Hi - Yet again it's been far too long since I've posted an entry.

We've had a good summer at Babur. We took the restaurant on the road. We didn't go far, but we had a good trip. Our first outing was to Blythe Hill Fields in June for what was the Brockley village fete and it was a terrific day out. We met a lot of people we hadn't seen in a long time and the weather couldn't have been better. And if you think a postcode in SE London doesn't know what a village fete should be, we had Morris dancers, the local church choir, the village brass band and welly-wanging. In July we went at least a whole mile further, to the Horniman Museum's Utsavan Fest, a celebration of music from India and they had a wonderful line-up of performers.

Our 23rd Baburthday celebration went very well and customers were very pleased with the effort our chefs and wine champion made in matching up five dishes to five wines we had selected for a tasting menu.

The news that has me very excited at the moment is Harden's 2009 London Restaurants guide. Harden's has always liked Babur and we've been very grateful to them and their customer/reviewers for their good opinion of us. But this year's guide had a special treat for us. We found out about it in the Evening Standard in an article about the release of the new Harden's and it said:

"Babur is named the capital's best restaurant in the £34-a-head and under category.The restaurant in Honor Oak Park is described as a modern Indian with wonderfully original cuisine."

It's hard to say just how exciting and wonderful that was to read and how good for all of Babur's hard-working staff to have some recognition. Thank you again to all who took the time and had the interest to write about us.

We've got our new a la carte menu up and we're hoping response to it will be good. Putting a new menu together is like playing three-dimensional chess. When you've got a short menu, every dish has to work for its place. Each one has to be different from the other, with different ingredients, cooking methods and spicing. The work of the menu has to be spread around the different stations in the kitchen, otherwise we get gridlock when it's busy and that's not good. And, of course, we have to keep our eyes on the cost of things because we have to be able to provide good value.

That's it for now but will be writing again very soon as we're getting ready for our next mini-food festival. We'll be celebrating Diwali with an exciting range of vegetarian dishes from 15 October to 30 November. So keep a look-out and stop by again soon.

Go fly a kite – Part 2

Hi there. I’m glad to say that our Punjabi festival is up and running and so far response has been pretty good. The dishes are turning out well and most of our customers are ordering from the festival menu. Most people looking in from outside will never realise what it takes to get a festival organised, but I guess that’s the same for most things.

Just as one example, we wanted to hang patangs (Indian fighting kites) in our front window and in our skylight but could not find anywhere to buy them in India. In the UK we could have bought patangs made from nylon or mylar but traditional ones are made from paper and then painted, so these wouldn’t really have looked right. So there we were, stumped and not long before the festival was due to begin.

Then Titu, one of our chefs, spoke up and said he’d make the kites if we would get the paper and bamboo for him. And he was really keen to do it because he used to fly kites back in India and, of course, he always made his own kites. We still needed someone to paint them for us and patangs are painted in all sorts of ways, with traditional decoration like ‘moth’s eyes’ on either side of the wings, like fighting cocks and other birds but they’re also painted according to the artist’s whims with political slogans, Bollywood stars – I even saw one with the profile of Alfred Hitchcock. Where would we find someone to do this for us on such short notice.

That’s when Pippa Graber came to our rescue. Pippa organises exhibits in many of the art galleries in our part of south London and she knows a lot of artists. It’s worth taking a look at her site – www.artdoglondon.co.uk - to find out about gallery exhibits, local artists and photographers.

Pippa put us in touch with Kate Pritchard, a Chelsea Arts graduate who does both sculpture installations and painting and she was happy to have a go at painting 14 kites. Her brief was to paint some traditionally and some with more local images. We couldn’t have been more pleased and delighted with the results. Along with a peacock, elephants and banana leaves, she also gave us the London Eye and a Damien Hirst ‘dot painting’. If you want to see some of Kate's work, take a look at her site: www.katepritchard.beep.com

Using kites as the image for the Basant festival has proved to be an idea with legs. The day we were hanging the kites, Pippa passed by and told us about the Blythe Park Fun Day, a family day out with food and events for children. The event is on Saturday 28 June and we’ll post more details in the next few days. We’ll be there and Titu Xxxx will be making kites and demonstrating how to fly a patang, Kate will be there with us painting kites and we’ll be serving some good Indian picnic food – our head chef Jiwan wants to do an enormous pot of biryani, some veg and non-veg kebabs and some cold snacks like chaat and puri.

Then we got a postcard from Lewisham Council about the Bike and Kite Festival on Blackheath which takes place Saturday 14 and Sunday 15 June and if we can, we’ll be there as well. More details on this next time as well. Thanks for stopping by again and we hope to see you, either at Babur or Blythe Park or maybe even Blackheath. You never know where we’ll turn up next.

5 May - 16 June

Hi there. We’ve been busy the past couple of months. Our celebration of Babur’s 525^th birthday was successful – our chefs gained a lot of confidence through cooking a cuisine they didn’t think they were familiar with. But as they were trying recipes for the festival, they realised there were interesting similarities (and some differences) with the Indian cuisines they’re more familiar with. We also raised over £400 for Afghanaid and their programme of replanting orchards in Afghanistan, some of which were first planted by Babur 500 years ago.

We’re about to start celebrating Basant – Punjabi New Year – with a festival of Punjabi cooking. Jiwan Lal, our head chef, has been wanting to highlight his home cooking for some time now and I think he’s really come up with some terrific dishes. He’s using noisettes of lamb to make dhungar lamb tikka which is marinated with smoked, crushed spices so the meat has a smoky taste from the marination as well as cooking in the tandoor. We’ve got some other Punjabi lamb dishes I never tasted as well made before like raarha lamb which is cooked in a tomato onion masala; and lamb patiyala which is a slow-cooked knuckle of lamb. But then are known for Punjabis having a good way with lamb.

What surprised me was just how much I liked some of the vegetarian dishes like the Punjabi wadi ki sab, white lentil dumplings with a nutty taste and a crunchy texture that reminded me of the gate kadhi, gram flour dumplings from our Rajasthani festival. But the veg dish I really loved was the sarso ka saag, mustard greens and spinach with corn-meal crisp bread. Being Bengali, I like mustard greens but I never tasted anything like this before and I thought I could be vegetarian on this dish.

And the dish that delighted us all was the steamed shoulder of lamb, which is sort of like the Punjabi version of Peking duck. Thick slices of shoulder on the bone are marinated for three days in lots of spices then steamed slowly till all the fat melts and bastes the lamb and it falls off the bone. You eat it with roti and thin slices of cucumber and red onion. This dish came from Azra Ali who is the wife of Riaz Ali, one of the two brothers who have owned a series of very good Punjabi restaurants around London. Some of you may remember when they owned Mirch Masala in south London and 5 Hot Chillies and Nauroz, both in north London. Wherever you are, thank you. The recipe appeared about eight years ago in Tandoori magazine and this seemed like a good time to put it on a menu.

Steamed shoulder of lamb

10-12 portions

10 lbs lamb shoulder, sawn into wide strips (about 4”, 10cm) by butcher

4 Tbsps crushed red chilli

4 Tbsps red chilli powder

4 Tbsps salt

5 Tbsps cumin

6 Tbsps coriander

4 tsps ‘OUR OWN GARAM MASALA’*

large handful crushed garlic paste

large handful crushed ginger paste

250ml lemon juice

vegetable oil to cover meat for marinating

Mix all spices, oil and lemon juice in large bowl to get even marinade mix. Taste to be sure of marinade flavour. Mix meat in well to completely coat with marinade. Put in fridge and marinate for at least 3 days. Can be made extra hot with fresh green chilli.

Put in pot with oil and marinade on medium fire and turn over frequently for about 20 minutes as meat must not brown. Once marinade starts bubbling, seal pot with flour/water paste. Steam for 3 hours until meat is soft and falls off the bone.

Serve with tandoori roti, julienne cucumber, thin slices of red onion, sliced chillies, wedges of lemon.

*This is how the recipe appeared in Tandoori. Jiwan came up with his own blend that seemed to create the same taste but he was also being a bit cagey about exactly what the spice blend is.

Also, before I go I wanted to tell you about a couple of offers that will be starting when our Punjabi festival begins. We thought of this because so many of our customers want to come to our food festivals but we can’t always accommodate everyone who wants to come to dine between 7:30 and 8:30. We thought we’d offer a couple of incentives to dine early or late with us. So we have two offers for you: 7 by 7 – all main courses offered at £7 when ordered by 7pm; and Wine after 9, with a free glass of wine (matched to your main course) for orders placed after 9pm. Both offers are valid from 5 May to 30 June and for parties up to four persons. You can also view our Punjabi festival menu, see our offers and make a booking online at www.babur.info.

Thanks for stopping by and next time I’ll have some news about our summer festivals and probably some other things by then.

HAPPY 525TH BIRTHDAY, BABUR

18 February - 18 March

It’s now just over two years since we re-opened Babur and it’s been a good year. What’s been especially gratifying is the enthusiastic response everyone has shown for the new look of the restaurant.

We’re all very happy with the way the restaurant has turned out but it has taken some getting used to. We didn’t manage to do as many events last year as we would have liked to. And judging from your response to the events we did hold, we think you’d probably like it if we did some more. Our two main events last year were the Colours of Rajasthan and our six-week celebration of the restaurant’s 22^nd birthday with a tasting menu. Thanks so much for your support and enthusiasm.

This year, we’re going to try to host more food events (more on that in the next mail) and for our first, we thought we’d go back to our roots. Some of our customers who celebrated Valentine’s Day with us last year may remember that our menu was also celebrating the Emperor Babur’s 524^th birthday. Well, the name of Babur has done very well for us over the years and we thought it would be good to find out a bit more about him.

The Bagh-i-Babur (Babur’s Garden) was built exactly 500 years ago. The Kabul of Babur’s day was very different from the Kabul we see today on the news. He planted his 11-hectare garden (which he called the Bagh-i-Wafa, Garden of Fidelity) on the slope of a hill in the countryside with views of his citadel. In his autobiography, the Baburnama, he describes his garden in real detail and in a way that is surprising from a man who conquered an empire:

In the southwest portion of the garden there is a pool surrounded by orange trees and some pomegranate trees. All around the pool is a clover meadow. The best place in the garden is there. When the oranges turn yellow it is a beautiful sight.

He writes in amazing detail about the land and produce of Afghanistan, about the fertility of the country, saying that the apples from one district are the best, while another produces the best pears or grapes. He talks about the banana trees he had planted and when they fruited, or about the sugarcane and orange groves, or the almond and peach blossoms in spring.

The past 30 years have not been kind to this beautiful country. During the Soviet occupation, many of the orchards were cut down for firewood because there was no other source of heat in the cold Kabul winters. It might sound silly to say, but we felt we wanted to give something back to the place the man who gave us his name loved best.

Since 2002, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture has been restoring the walled Babur Gardens, including the simple grave open to the sky Babur requested for himself, and at the same time restoring one of the great amenities of Kabul to its people. Looking at what the Gardens were before and after restoration (which you can follow on http://www.archnet.org/library/sites/one-site.jsp?site_id=12541), it’s easy to see why Babur so loved Afghanistan. But there were many productive orchards across Afghanistan and these need to be replanted.

In 1990, Afghanaid began setting up nurseries of fruit and timber tress to help introduce new varieties and demonstrate better ways of planting and cultivating trees. By late 1994, a stock of 67,727 almond, apple, apricot, peach and other fruit trees had been grown for distribution in four provinces.

This is a large-scale, long-term project and we are pleased to be contributing towards this. To see what Afghanaid is doing, visit http://www.afghanaid.org.uk/events/baburs_525th_birthday.phtml. During the course of Babur’s 525^th birthday celebration, from 18 February to 18 March, we will contribute £1 for each party that orders from our festival menu. Customers who wish may make their own contributions.

We’ll be posting the festival menu and more information in the next blog entry and we hope to see you during Babur’s 525^th birthday celebration. Thanks for visiting.